Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: History, Memory, and Fiction

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose short story “Gilgul” appears in the magazine this week, was not a fiction writer. Indeed “Gilgul” is the only story he wrote, and although Yerushalmi’s widow Ophra told Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor, that it “may reveal a hidden wish on his part to have taken the other road,” that road remained untrodden: Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, never claimed the place in Jewish-American fiction that the story hints he might have.

Instead, he became a celebrated Jewish historian, and bequeathed important works on the history of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Freud’s relationship to Judaism, and the very concept of Jewish history. In “Zakhor,” a slim volume that is arguably his most famous, Yerushalmi meditates on that concept, unraveling a tangle of paradoxes surrounding memory and history in Judaism. He explains why despite Judaism’s essential and inherent fixation on remembrance and the past, Jews all but gave up keeping track of their history for more than a thousand years after they were scattered into diaspora following the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E., and why even when the dam of Jewish historiography was broken, in the centuries following the Spanish expulsion of 1492, a vexed relationship between Jewish memory and Jewish history endured.

These sorts of contradictions make apt grist for the mill of academia, but they also resonated more personally for Yerushalmi, who was not only a professional Jewish historian—“a new creature in Jewish history,” as he wrote in “Zakhor”—but also an ordained rabbi, who briefly led a congregation in Larchmont. All the academic questions congealed for him around a deeply personal one: how is it possible to write the history of a people that is inherently obsessed with “history”—its own complexly filtered version of it—and how is it possible to do so from within (inescapably within) the tradition of that people? “I live,” he wrote, “within the ironic awareness that the very mode in which I delve into the Jewish past represents a decisive break with that past.” “Zakhor” was, as he put it, “an effort to understand myself as a Jewish historian”: though unimpeachably rigorous and scholarly, it is at heart a personal work.

“Gilgul,” too, was “personal,” as Ophra Yerushalmi remarked to Deborah Treisman, and each intellectual strand of “Zakhor,” it seems, can be traced through it. The dichotomy faced by Ravitch—between rationality and mysticism—is in some ways a fictional manifestation of the conflict between Jewish history and Jewish memory that Yerushalmi charted in “Zakhor.” The troubled soul whom the mystic speaks of is haunted by a past that is both real and inaccessible, a problem that echoes the Jewish relationship to history. And the concept of the gilgul itself reflects the tendency of Jewish memory to conceive of time cyclically, to conflate historical moments across vast swaths of time—Yerushalmi quotes the Haggadah: “In each and every generation let each person regard himself as though he had emerged from Egypt.”

“Gilgul” also stems from Yerushalmi’s fascination with Freud and Kafka, who are, Harold Bloom writes in the foreword to “Zakhor,” the “largest figures in modern Jewish culture” and the “hidden presences” in the book. Bloom suspects that the Jewishness of these figures “consists in their intense obsession with interpretation” and posits each as a polarity of that Jewish obsession: Freud as the champion of interpretability, Kafka of tantalizing opacity. And indeed “Gilgul,” like “Zakhor,” dwells on interpretation. “This story is meant for you,” the mystic tells Ravitch (a conscious echo of Kafka: “This gate was made only for you,” the doorkeeper crushingly tells the man from the country in Kafka’s parable). But despite his very Jewish obsession with interpretation, Ravitch cannot puzzle out the mystic’s riddle no matter how much he twists it around in his mind.

The correspondences aren’t neat, but the intersection of life and art never is. Fiction merely refracts the inner life of the artist, bending it unpredictably, just as memory bends history. And it is clear, in the closing chapter of “Zakhor,” that the idea of fiction was flickering in Yerushalmi’s mind. In light of the enduring conflict between Jewish history and Jewish memory, he wrote, modern Jews await “a new, metahistorical myth, for which the novel provides at least a temporary modern surrogate.” He never wrote any novels, of course, but he remained “far from immune to the seductions of myth” and “more aware than most of its place in the healthy life of a people.” “Gilgul” provides a glimpse of that awareness, of how he would have met the modern Jewish yearning for fiction—and shows a new perspective of the ideas that coursed through a fascinating mind.